The rise of cloud-based products and services is well known. Consumers interact with such services in innumerable ways. To use one common example, students use electronic books from cloud providers (e.g., GOOGLE BOOKS™) to read books on their laptop computers in dorm rooms, and then continue reading from the same spots in the books on their smart phones while on a campus bus. To make such functionality available, cloud providers typically keep track of certain information related to each user, such as which books the user's account has been authorized to read, and where in the book the user last stopped reading.
A concern that arises with widespread use of cloud products and services is the risk that a cloud provider, or a third party, may attempt to access the user's information for purposes that the user has not authorized. In one extreme example, users might be concerned that a political or governmental organization might try to learn how much time the user spends with various types of books.
Encryption is a known method of making data difficult to access for users who have not been authorized, but use of traditional encryption techniques often require significant computing overhead and user involvement. Furthermore, some parties (e.g., the vendors themselves or government agencies) may believe they have certain rights to access data while end users take a different view of the extent of such authorization.
Another mechanism for protecting information is through legal means. Software vendors, for example, often distribute their products and services via license agreements that impose specific restrictions on what the users can do with the licensed software. Adding further to such protection, in 1998 the United States implemented as part of its copyright law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), certain provisions of which include “anti-circumvention provisions” (see, e.g., 17 U.S.C. §1201(a)) that in general terms make it illegal to disable technological protection measures in electronic devices (e.g., DVDs and DVD players, video games and other computer software or hardware).
While vendors have used encryption, DMCA protections and other mechanisms as a means of protection, to date systems have not been developed to permit users of cloud services to take advantage of similar protections.
It is generally desirable for consumers to have mechanisms and systems that ensure the protection of information they may provide in connection with use of cloud-based offerings.